The Multifarious Multiplexity of Taika Waititi

The actor, writer, and director Taika Waititi confessed that he doesn't like being around people about seven minutes into our second conversation. He assured me that there was nothing loaded about the remark, but he also seemed to mean it. Even my family. I've never met many people before.

It was hard to believe. Waititi seems to be in the extreme. He is goofy and antic, with an easy familiarity and a seemingly bottomless amount of energy. He is known for keeping his sets lively, playing music, launching into bits of odd comedy, and sometimes doing directorial, where he disappears and reappears in a different outfit. The set of the movie was described by the actress as one long parade.

Waititi can be charming, but his default mode is silly, like a private game you've been invited to join. He is good at reading people and slipping into whatever mode they like. Waititi became calm and reflective when he became anxious and earnest in interviews. At the time, I thought it meant that I was seeing Taika, the person he becomes when he doesn't feel obliged to be amusing. The more we talked, it became clear that Waititi wasn't real with me. Every person Waititi spends time with feels like they have a special connection. It is a taxing task. I just want everyone to be happy, as Waititi observed at several points in our conversation.

Waititi was born in New Zealand and spent his thirties making cultishly popular films. Two of these, Boy and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, were set in poor, rural areas similar to where Waititi was raised. The unfamiliar characters and situations, the startling mix of brutality and humor, and also sweetly affectionate, even loving, are some of the things that felt radical in both movies. The kind of depressing dramas where everyone is a prostitute and they all die in is not what Waititi makes. His movies are a sustained high-wire act where moods mix and shift in exhilarating ways. While dramatic movies tend to build slowly, in a single dark register, Waititi will often move abruptly from a slapstick moment to a tender or heart-rending one, with devastating effect.

Waititi's career has gone vertical in six years. He poked fun at it in his 2016 movie, re-energizing the franchise. He wrote, directed, and starred in the Oscar-winning movie about a lonely boy in Nazi Germany who has an imaginary friend, played by Waititi. Since then, Waititi has directed and acted in episodes of The Mandalorian, produced and co-starred in the HBO Max series Our Flag Means Death, and co-created Free Guy.

It seems that this range and shifting of tone and sensibility is the work of Waititi himself. He is a person who seeks out company and attention but quickly tires of both. He is easily amused and yet it seems like he is bored. In conversation, Waititi can be forthcoming, he admitted that he struggles to order in restaurants because he is so worried about making the wrong choice, but also comes across as profoundly guarded. He told me that he doesn't trust adults and dislikes authority, even as the director of large and expensive movies, including this summer's Ragnarok sequel.

Waititi said he spent time in therapy because he realized he needed tocipher what he was doing as a writer and director. It is difficult to decipher Waititi himself. He is now solidly into middle age, a time when responsibilities tend to make life less enjoyable. Waititi still manages to be both, though he resents when people interpret his on-set hijinks as a sign that he's just messing around, because he's also really committed to work.

When I visited Waititi in Los Angeles this past February, he was just back from spending two months in Australia and New Zealand, where he had been working on script for several projects while spending time with his two young daughters. His daughters spend most of the year in New Zealand after his divorce. Waititi wore a pink pineapple-print shirt and shorts set at Comic-Con, but on the day we met, he was dressed casually in blue pants and a sea.

Waititi said that he comes off as very gay because of his clothes, but also because the characters he plays often have an edge. Waititi's Hitler is between a cheerful camp counselor and a slightly effeminate authority figure. In the mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Waititi plays a sweet-natured and fastidious dandy named Viago, who is a foil to the leche.

What We Do in the Shadows is the funniest film by Waititi. In it, we see the vampire turn into bats and feed on humans, but also bicker about household chores, ride the bus, and worry about their social status. The movie was Waititi's third feature, and the first to develop a worldwide earnest following due to its loopy dialog. Some of our clothes are from people who have died. You might bite someone, and then you think, "Ooh, those are some nice pants!" Viago pines over a lost love, while Vladislav is obsessed with his archnemesis, the Beast, an evil being who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend.

Waititi's skills are largely self-taught. Waititi works more naturally than directors who study technical details. Sometimes, he said, he will just watch a rough cut of one of his films and write down all the places he feels embarrassed in. When it comes to fine-tuning a movie's emotional currents, he's also strict, especially when it comes to noticing moments when a film turns too serious or jokey. This is also true off-set. He will abandon an outfit if the socks ruin it, or if it feels wrinkled. The process is part of why he sometimes arrives late, but it's worse in the mornings when no fiddling seems to fix the problem. He said that it was almost like it was jinxed the day.

In the early stages of writing, Waititi often begins by making a list of songs that he listens to again and again, not a soundtrack so much as an aural mood board. He tries not to assign a gender at first and will sometimes swap roles with a male character. Willie Jack, the character played by PaulinaAlexis on Reservation Dogs, was originally written as a male. Waititi's screenplays tend to have seven years for Boy, 11 for Wilderpeople, and nine for Jojo Rabbit, and are further revised on the fly, with Waititi throwing new lines at actors in take after take. He acknowledged that it is a risky strategy. Changes in dialog can change the emotional arcs of a character. In an industry that is heavily dependent on bringing shoots in on time and staying within budget, such compounding adjustments have consequences, to the point that a director might lose control or be kicked off their own film.

Waititi wants to experiment both in the moment and during editing. Clement remembers Waititi being restless as a performer. Clement said that when the two did live comedy shows together in their twenties, Waititi would initially follow the planned beats but would soon get bored and start to improvise. He's not good at that.

The actor told a similar story. He said that Waititi would sometimes play the theme song from the 1981 war drama Gallipoli, which ended with Mel Gibson running through the trenches trying to stop the troops. I don't know why he did it, but the memory made him laugh. The more stimuli, the better.

Waititi seems to be anarchic. His work can often seem like an ongoing exploration of what it means to grow up, as he is good at capturing the inner lives of children. Waititi seems to be driven by a question about how to be childish without being childish. Waititi said he was attracted to disruptive forces in his life like chaos or big changes. It is a chaotic environment where you are always on edge, stressed and everything could fall over at any moment. You put yourself in that firing line all the time.

One of the central themes in Waititi's movies is disillusionment, and the ways imagination can protect and endanger. His characters often get lost in their own thoughts as a way to cope with loss. It is usually a cautionary tale when adults appear. The men are unreliable due to their immature, fecund, and stunted nature. Children who end up stuck in their fantasies, at least as Waititi writes them, emerge clear-eyed: They wake up.

Robin Cohen, Waititi's mother, was a teacher from a family of Jewish tailors who fled the pogroms in Russia for London and Wellington. Cohen is an intellectual and a communist, and he often reads over Waititi's homework and 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 888-270-6611 His father was named Taika, but everyone called him Tiger in a small tribe in a remote area on the island's rocky East Coast. He spent time in and out of prison after founding a motorcycle gang in his twenties. He painted landscapes and portraits but also idealized images of Native Americans. The two met when Cohen was on a charity visit to the prison, bringing books for the inmates, and Waititi has described the relationship as the most improbable match you could imagine.

Waititi's parents separated when he was 5 years old and his father moved back to Waihau Bay. Waititi developed a knack for moving between different groups while going back and forth between the two places. Both families used to be poor. Waititi said that he learned at an early age that you can't trust adults.

As a kid, Waititi spent hours watching American television shows and movies, including classics like The Young and the Restless and Love at First Bite, and he still finds TV comforting. He remembered his childhood with a lot of nostalgia, because it was fraught with money tight and his father not around.

He enjoyed sketching, making radio plays, or inventing adventure tales in which he would play all the parts. At one point, he went through a phase of drawing swastikas in his school notebooks, which he hid from his classmates, and eventually turned the swastika into a window, which became part of a city. Waititi mines this, lightly, in Jojo Rabbit, when 10-year-old Jojo admits that he is a swastika.

Waititi's film, Boy, tells the story of an 11-year-old boy and his younger brother, who live with various cousins under the care of their grandmother while their father is in jail. The film was shot in the same house where Waititi lived, and many of the details, like the rusted Toyota that can be started with a spoon, come from Waititi's life. In the movie, Boy fantasizes about his absent father, who he believes to be a deep-sea diver, master carver, and rugby star, but who is ultimately revealed to be self-deluding and petulant. Waititi told Mariayah Kaderbhai, the head of programming for the British Academy, that he and his cousins would lie on the bed.

When I spoke with Kaderbhai, she pointed out that Waititi's work could be seen as a way to control his trauma.

The question behind Boy is whether the young kids we meet will end up stuck in lives like those of their parents. Waititi has described his own life as a kind of miracle, as many of his cousins in Waihau Bay did. Boy won't become his father because of the story and it seems to set him on a different path. It's clear that he's still a kid, surrounded by poverty, lack of opportunity, and a kind of stagnant resignation, that work against his abundant promise.

For a long time, Waititi's own future was also uncertain. He toured after graduating from the University of Wellington. He was the lead guitarist in a band. He was an artist for almost 10 years, painting and etchings, and lived in Berlin for a while. The work from this period had a comic edge, and one of the early pieces was titled What Clouds See When They Daydream. A series of altered New Zealand dollars featuring figures from history in place of Queen Elizabeth reflected a growing awareness of colonialism. Waititi seemed to be experimenting more often. He admitted that he used his own blood to paint nudes, though he seemed to regret having mentioned it.

The anarchic performance scene drew Waititi back to Wellington. It was like a giant creative hive, with a lot of people doing different things. Waititi spent time in an artists collective located in a warehouse next to a national museum that hosted an endless cycling cast of visitors. The warehouse had no interior walls, so residents just took over a zone while working on a project.

Waititi and Jemaine Clement played in a comedy duo called Humourbeasts, which played to sold-out houses. He played a student turned drug lord in the black comedy Scarfies and was one of five male dancers in the TV series The Strip. Waititi was popular, but he could also be shy. At dinner parties organized with his housemates, Waititi would sometimes stay downstairs by himself and draw.

The 10-minute short Two Cars, One Night was made by Waititi in 2003 after he wrote the script while on the set of The Strip. Waititi has said that he decided to take the leap one day after sitting in the green room and staring at the ingrown hairs on his legs. I fell in love with film. And eventually I did.

It wasn't obvious. New Zealand films were known for being tense and dark. Waititi said someone always dies. Waititi tried to work in a similar vein. He was hired in 2004 to adapt a book by a New Zealand bushman, which would later become Hunt for the Wilderpeople. Neal said that the original script was bleak.

Sterlin Harjo was one of the Indigenous filmmakers that Waititi worked with at the 2005 festival. The idea for Reservation Dogs was developed by Harjo and Waititi in order to subvert how Indigenous characters are presented in film and TV. Among other things, the cast includes Dallas Goldtooth as a laconic and outrageously inappropriate spirit guide who gives advice, and a pair of rapping brothers who cruise the neighborhood on matching kid-size bikes spreading gossip. The people were funny. That was missing from Native film.

Waititi has an extraordinary ability to get projects greenlit, he has a standing deal with FX, and will often go out of his way to hire Indigenous actors and crew. It helps that Hollywood studios have a penchant for elevating certain independent talents and seem to have embraced Waititi's quirks; it also helps that his work has found new levels of respect. In 2020, Jojo Rabbit was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, while Waititi was nominated for two Emmys, for his voice-acting on The Mandalorian and as a producer on the TV adaptation of What We Do in the Shadows. Despite these awards, Waititi has occasionally been frustrated by the way comedy can be treated as a kind of subform of art. That's when you can give a more profound message.

For contractual reasons, Waititi couldn't tell me much about the film, except that he tried to write it as a love story, and that his visual influences were Jack Hardy comics and the cover. He said that he tried to make the film within the confines of the genre. It's the same approach he used in the movie, where he deftly subverted the superhero beats by transforming him from a stiff, standard-issue warrior-god into a funny, awkward, surprisingly sweet, occasionally sulky man-child. What are they expecting me to do?

Even as his projects have become bigger and more mainstream, Waititi has managed to keep his offbeat sense of humor. Waititi has said that he will agree with everything an executive says and then do what he wants. He said that he was trying to not do what the grown-ups told him to. It is a familiar dilemma, but one that is particularly difficult for Waititi, whose work is based on the ability. People love Waititi's films because they have a weird rhythm and gags. But how do you keep that going?

Losing some of the infrastructure is part of the answer for Waititi. The story of a Dutch coach trying to get American Samoa's national soccer team to the World Cup is one of his current projects. The film is small and stars a number of Pacific Islanders.

Waititi likes to cook, do the crossword, and watch TV on the rare occasions when he takes time off. He used to play online chess, but stopped when he became too obsessed. He talked about an alternate life in which he painted and tinkered. When I mentioned that he was currently writing, editing, or directing three feature films and five TV series, I felt a sense of vicarious panic. I feel like I have more ideas than that.

It was hard not to wonder if this huge buffet of projects would backfire, feeding Waititi's desire for variety at the expense of quality. But rather than being discouraged by the prospect, he was more than happy to keep everything in the air and the possibility that it could all come crashing down.

After visiting Waititi in Los Angeles, I watched his most ambitious and beautiful film, Jojo Rabbit. There was no imaginary Hitler in the original book, but Waititi changed it significantly, adapting it from a book by Christine Leunens. The book was darker because it followed the lives of the children beyond the end of the war. Waititi stopped the camera on a moment of hope. Hitler and the self-serving deceptions of Nazism have woken up to the fact that Jojo is their son. The war is over. He is capable of joy despite having experienced devastating loss. He is a child just beginning to grow into his potential. He has complete control of his world.

Styling assistance was provided byElla Harrington. April Bautista uses Oribe at Dew Beauty Agency. The person styling the props is Chloe Kirk. Issey Miyake has a top and pants. The second and third images are of a suit and shoes.

The July/August 2022 issue contains this article. You can subscribe now.

Let us know what you think. Send a letter to the editor towired.com.